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Need your advice...
One of my clients is building a directory of video games (all pages based on a given template). His directory is categorized according to the type of game a given site offers.
E.G.
One of the categories is called "DOOM GAMES, next category is called " BLUE CHERRIES ", next category - " RED CHERRIES " , etc.
My client searches for the sites that offer games online.
He creates one listing with the description of all games a site offers and places this listing in ALL RELEVANT categories. If a site offers 3 games - blue cherries, red cherries, and doom games - he places the same listing in BLUE CHERRIES category, RED CHERRIES category , and DOOM GAMES category.
As a result he gets pages that are similar to each other in content. They are NOT identical because he changes the TITLE of each page, keywords and some other elements of optimization. Yet, the "meat" of the page - the listing that describes the site - remains the same in several categories.
My concern is that such structure of the site will attract "duplicate content" penalty.
What do you think?
Pages are not penalised just for being (almost) similar. If their degree of similarity is over a certain (unknown) level, one page will be regarded as the original and prefered over the others, but the others will not be penalised, they will just be ranked lower by the algorithm.
A penalty is an altogether different thing. It will be decided individually by a human and you can never be quite sure what may trigger such a decision. If your client's small edits look like attempts to cheat a search engine he may have a problem. He should be very carefull to make those almost identical pages a real benefit for his visitors.
